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Astor Shake
Mix two tablespoonfuls of strawberry syrup and one tablespoonful of pineapple syrup with three tablespoonfuls of rich cream. Add one egg, cracked ice, and shake thoroughly. Strain into a glass, add soda water and decorate with a few strawberries.
A soda-fountain shake from the first year of national Prohibition. The construction is straightforward, but the whole raw egg is not something a modern kitchen can reproduce as written.
- The raw egg is the problemThe egg goes in whole, is shaken with ice and cream, and is served immediately with no heat step at any point. Nothing in the drink reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which lives inside intact, clean-looking shell eggs and was not understood as a hazard in 1919. A shaken drink also sits at fountain temperature while it is strained, topped with soda and garnished.
- Cream compounds itCream in this period may or may not have been pasteurised, depending on the local milk supply. Combined with raw egg and served without being held cold, it adds to the risk. If you want a shake of this style, use a current recipe built for pasteurised ingredients.
- Fountain syrups, not squeeze bottlesStrawberry and pineapple syrup here mean thick sugar syrups made with fruit juice, roughly the consistency of the syrups still sold for sodas. The recipe sets three tablespoonfuls of syrup against three of cream.
- Soda water means charged waterPlain carbonated water from a siphon or fountain tap, not a flavoured or sweetened mixer. Here it is added after the mixture is strained into the glass.
- Cracked iceIce broken into small pieces, coarser than crushed ice, for chilling in the shaker.
- YieldOne soda-fountain glass; the quantity of soda water, which is unspecified, determines the final volume.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon, a home drinks book published in 1919, on the eve of national Prohibition, offers the elaborate technique of the bar in a form no one could object to: syrups, cream, eggs and charged water instead of spirits. The Astor Shake is often said to take its name, as fountain drinks of the era sometimes did, from a fashionable New York hotel — the Hotel Astor on Times Square was one of the city's grandest addresses — but the derivation is speculation, and no documented connection to its kitchens has been shown. The whole egg shaken into a sweet drink is a direct inheritance from the pre-Prohibition flip and egg phosphate, where the egg was valued for the foam and body it gave and was widely regarded as nourishing; soda fountains kept the technique alive for another generation, and drug-store menus were still listing egg drinks well into the 1930s.